December 13, 2017 (Update)

A joint 3GPP SA4 & VR Industry Forum Workshop on Standards took place in Santa Clara from the 4 - 6 December. Around 120 participants attended sessions on:

• Standardisation coordination
• VR content production issues
• Service providers’ technical requirements
• VR Hardware/device manufacturer challenges 

The following presentations are now available for download on the 3GPP server:

VR Standardization Overviews:

• 3GPP activities around VR, Gilles Teniou, SA4 Vice Chairman
• Overview of OMAF, Youngkwon Lim, Chair of MPEG Systems, Samsung Research
• Khronos OpenXR - Paul Pedriana, Oculus
• W3C - Wendy Seltzer
• VR-IF, Rob Koenen
• DVB CM-VR, Ludovic Noblet
• DASH for VR, Thomas Stockhammer, DASH-IF IOP Chair
• Consumer Technology Association, Kerri Haresign

Content production and Service Provider Presentations:

• The next generation consumers; Jim Chabin, The advanced imaging society
• How are EBU PSM Members using 360/VR?, Paola Sunna - EBU
• VR/360 Audio Production & Workflow, Glenn Forsythe, Gaudio 
• VR Service Providers - Verizon, Raheel Khalid
• VR Service Providers - Orange, Morgan Bouchet
• VR Service Providers - Littlstar, Sunny Atwal
• Considerations for Immersive Media Services, Michael Chen, Comcast
• GearVR Ecosystem & Services, Youngkwon Lim, Samsung Research   

Meeting Information

The Workshop was hosted at the Ericsson Conference Facility – Santa Clara, CA. 

• The December 2017 Workshop agenda is …here

Further reading:

(from November 2017)

3GPP WG SA4 has recently completed a detailed study on Virtual Reality where media formats and technical enablers for VR services were studied and documented in a technical report TR 26.918. The report also contains subjective test results for both binaural audio and video (viewport independent and dependent streaming).

The group has now launched the following work and study items:

• Work Item on Virtual Reality Profiles for Streaming Media (VRStream) which objective is to define the relevant media and protocol enablers for the set of VR Streaming use cases.
• Work Item on Test Methodologies for the Evaluation of Perceived Listening Quality in Immersive Audio Systems (LIQUIMAS) which goal is to produce technical specifications, one with subjective and one with objective test methodologies for the assessment of immersive audio systems.
• Study Item on 3GPP codecs for VR audio (FS_CODVRA) which goal is to assess the suitability of existing 3GPP audio coding capabilities for enabling Virtual Reality services and to give recommendations how existing codecs should be used and configured in order to provide the best possible VR QoE.
• Study Item on QoE metrics for VR (FS_QoE_VR) which objective is to investigate the QoE parameters and metrics which may need to be reported by the client to the network for evaluation of VR user experience.

About SA4

SA4 Working Group (Codecs) deals with the specifications for speech, audio, video, and multimedia codecs. Other topics within the mandate of SA WG4 are: quality evaluation, end-to-end performance, and interoperability aspects with existing mobile and fixed networks (from codec point of view) ...more about SA4

About VR-IF

The Virtual Reality Industry Forum (http://www.vr-if.org) “…is composed of a broad range of participants from sectors including, but not limited to, the movie, television, broadcast, mobile, and interactive gaming ecosystems, comprising content creators, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, professional equipment manufacturers and technology companies… The VR Industry Forum is not a standards development organization, but will rely on, and liaise with, standards development organizations for the development of standards in support of VR services and devices.”  

Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP